The illusion of independence

I think it’s an unspoken rule of politics that the person who claims to be unideological is the most ideological of all. Thus one of the central assertions of the newly formed “Independent Group” (IG) of British MPs is that while the blinkered automatons to their Right and Left see everything through an ideological prism, they, by contrast, do not pre-judge but look at every issue dispassionately and according to the evidence.

Thus when asked by Andrew Marr last Sunday whether the IG would support the renationalisation of the railways and the water industry, former Tory MP Heidi Allen replied: “My gut instinct is no but it needs to be based on evidence and, rather than just choosing ideological solutions, what will work and what we can learn from other countries.”

If you have that strange feeling of déjà vu, that’s because an insistence on ‘what works,’ as opposed to ideological prescriptions, was a staple of the New Labour years. Ministers could get way with claiming they judged everything according to the evidence because the evidence they relied on was produced by people whose ideological biases were so ‘baked in’ they thought they didn’t exist.

You’re only ill because you think you are

This can be seen most clearly in the story of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), the tick box questionnaire that determines whether sick and disabled people can receive benefit and, if so, what conditions are attached. Judged in terms of the amount of misery it has generated – it was revealed in 2017 that the number of disabled claimants attempting suicide had doubled over the lifespan of the WCA – I think the assessment has no equal among post-war domestic government policies.

But its introduction was surrounded by mountains of evidence that it was the correct policy, medically and socially. In fact that it would be grossly unfair, it was claimed, to leave disabled people ‘parked’ on benefits and shut out from the health-giving qualities of work. In 2005, for example, the DWP commissioned a report called the Scientific and Conceptual Basis for Incapacity Benefit. Co-written by the department’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Mansel Aylward, the paper recommended something called the biopsychosocial (BPS) model. This assumes that disability is caused in part by the disabled person’s attitudes. Illness was a belief, said the authors, and people could think themselves well.

They recommended, therefore, a “functional” non-medical assessment for all claimants on Incapacity Benefit, one that ignored diagnosis, prognosis and medical history. This became the WCA. The opinions of doctors weren’t mysteriously overlooked when the WCA came into being in 2008, they were deliberately ignored.

A year after the ‘Scientific and Conceptual Basis’ for the WCA was established, the DWP started funding a group of academics to run something known as the PACE trial, which compared the effectiveness of different treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or ME. The results from the trial were published in 2011 and were presented as demonstrating the visible success of BPS interventions such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The then Conservative-Lib Dem government was miraculously bowled over by the evidence, with minister David Freud telling the House of Lords that “we have gone for the biopsychosocial model” which had “garnered very significant academic support”.

In fact, the research was very seriously flawed. An analysis by the Centre for Welfare Reform revealed that the supposedly “strict” standard for recovery was so loose that you could actually deteriorate and still be classed as having recovered. Another analysis of the whole BPS model concluded that it was “riddled with inconsistencies, misleading statements and ‘unevidenced’ claims”.

But so entrenched is the government’s faith in the ‘evidence’, that even Mansel Aylward, the man responsible for the adoption of the BPS model, admitting in 2012 that he now found it “unsatisfactory” and incapable of meeting the needs of disabled people, had no effect. The WCA steamroller, now over 10 years old, just continues on, oblivious of the collateral damage it causes.

I’m a banker so listen to me

But the WCA needed more than BPS philosophy – the idea that claimants were divided between real sufferers and malingerers – behind it to really fly. It also needed the evidence that there were legions of claimants who were ‘work ready’ and in fact, unjustly, left to rot on benefits. This was provided by David Freud, a millionaire and former investment banker, who despite admitting he knew nothing about welfare, produced the independent 2007 report Reducing Welfare, Increasing Opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work’, commissioned by Tony Blair just before he left office.

The ‘Freud Report’ was hugely influential – New Labour accepted its recommendations as did the Cameron government that followed. In fact, Cameron was so impressed he ennobled Freud and made him a junior minister in his government. The Freud Report achieved a ‘cross-party’ consensus. As a former Labour DWP minister put it in July 2010, “the Labour government’s regulations are now being tabled by a Tory minister who inspired them when he was a Labour adviser”.

Not only did Freud advocate using the private sector to conduct the assessments required to receive sickness benefit, and introducing sanctions, he also asserted that the 2.68 million people on Incapacity Benefit could and should be reduced by 1 million.

This number was subsequently cited endlessly ministers but, as geographer Danny Dorling pointed out, it was based on fiction. Freud “got his numbers” wrong by claiming the remarkable success of government ‘Pathways’ projects in getting Incapacity Benefit claimants into work could be replicated nationally. In fact, the success of the pathways projects was based on recent claimants only, not long-term ones.

 But this didn’t affect the Freud Report from becoming the lynchpin of government efforts to ‘reform’ the welfare state. The reason was not his academic rigour but who he was. As Dorling explained:

David’s report is titled Independent but was commissioned and published by the DWP. Independent no longer means independent. The point of independent reports to government and ministers is that they are not written by people who are independent of government but by folk whose lives and connections are intimately wound up in the machinery of government and elite civil society.

The fallacy of independence

Ironically it was Heidi Allen who confessed that, on becoming an MP, she was “staggered” that minister were not , in fact, experts in their field and MPs were handed “bits of paper” indicating what they should say to the media. But the fact that, in truth, they don’t know very much just reveals how reliant on outside evidence they are.

And that evidence is never unideological despite fervent claims to the contrary. While in 2007, a former investment banker was hired to produce a report arguing that sick and disabled benefit claimants needed to be reassessed into work, two years later the government commissioned two reports – Bischoff and Wigley – insisting the competitiveness of London as a financial centre had to be maintained at all costs. Group members and expert witnesses came overwhelmingly from the City of London. Finance, as one outside analysis pointed out, was reporting on “finance by telling stories about finance”. But all three, in eyes of the Westminster bubble, constituted ‘evidence’.

In truth, nothing is unideological and there is no such thing as pure, neutral evidence. Pretending you’re above the fray just reveals how deeply ensconced you are in its web – so much so that you don’t even notice.

The Liberalism Nobody Knows

Liberal democracy (or liberal-democracy) appears as one of those natural pairings of the English language – a linguistic partnership that enhances, rather than does violence to, its constituents. It has become a modern truism that liberalism and democracy are inseparable bedfellows, soul mates even. Where liberalism is vanquished, democracy, at best, becomes a plebiscitary tool to vindicate the wishes of absolute rulers. Conversely, where liberalism is allowed to flourish, democracy – defined as free elections, an independent media and free speech – inevitably follows.

But this comfortable view, which permits its proponents to always feel they are siding with the angels, is a delusion. As Domenico Losurdo shows in Liberalism: A Counter-History, liberalism had quite separate roots from democracy and was fully prepared to countenance the seemingly illiberal tools of coups and dictatorship if it felt threatened from below. The much vaunted, and supposedly natural, coupling of liberalism and democracy was a slow, painful and fitful process, invariably achieved against the will of liberals and to which they have never been reconciled.

The rarely told history of liberalism

Losurdo traces the history of liberalism back to the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688. The subsequent Bill of Rights limited the power of the monarch and allowed a Parliamentary (though emphatically not democratic) system to emerge. From that point, liberalism was defined as opposition to concentration of power, in the form of the monarch and sometimes the Catholic Church. The other side of the coin was the liberty of people to be unrestrained by state power. But this liberty was never meant to be the birthright of everyone. Far from it, only “the community of the free”, in Lusurdo’s phrase, a small minority of male property-owners, were so blessed. The role of everyone else – the vast majority of people – was merely to be their servants.

Thus it was no accident that the liberal era was coeval with the slave trade, “the largest involuntary movement of human in all history”, and the establishment of a brutal system of racial chattel slavery in the United States – a British settler colony that achieved independence. In the metropolitan countries, the vast majority of non-property owners were not slaves but they were enchained as serfs or wage labourers. Freedom, to early liberalism, was the freedom of property owners to enjoy their property as they wished. In England, from 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250 and these were almost always for crimes against property. In England at the start of 19^th century you could be hung for taking an unauthorized clipping from an ornamental bush.

The newly independent United States of America was a bastion of liberalism. But as British loyalists pointed out, this love of liberty went hand in hand with the consecration of the ‘worst species of slavery’. The Britain derived from the Glorious Revolution, the rebel colonists shot back, presided over the horror of the slave trade and treated its white servants little better than slaves.

Both accusations were true and both exposed the underbelly of liberalism. The veneration of freedom for some people was dependent on the complete opposite – total subjection and domination – for many others. To work this required an intricate ideology of dehumanisation. The French liberal Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès regarded wage labourers as “bipedal machines”, while the British liberal-conservative Edmund Burke (a man considered to be the father of modern conservatism who incidentally subscribed to the most elaborate Jewish conspiracy theories) looked upon workers as mere instrumentum vocale.

And when these machines began to make demands, the sheen of opposition to ‘despotism’ miraculously fell away. John Locke, the most influential of the early liberals, regarded physical force as entirely justified in the event of a tax not authorised by those affected by it. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was intransigently opposed to attempts to legally reduce the 12 hour day, introduce progressive taxation or instigate rent controls and believed “nothing authorizes the state to interfere in industry”. He supported the idea of a temporary dictatorship to modernize France. In Britain, between 1790 and 1820, more than 60 Acts of Parliament were passed aimed at repressing working class activity. Liberals enthusiastically endorsed the discipline of the workhouse.

The story of the vote

This is not to deny the umbilical connection of liberalism to self-government and representative, elected institutions – ‘no taxation without representation’ as the American rebels famously proclaimed – but the section of the population to be represented was necessarily and intentionally tiny. Britain had Parliamentary institutions – powerful bodies that had succeeded in executing a King and, since the Glorious Revolution, formed part of a constitutional monarchy – but prior to the Great Reform Act only 3 per cent of the public were entitled to determine who their members were – about 200,000 out of a population of eight million.

In 1832, the franchise was extended to 13 per cent of adult males, but Chartism, a mass movement calling for universal manhood suffrage and annual elections, was bitterly resisted and above all by avowed liberals. “In England” Karl Polanyi reminds us, “it became the unwritten law of the Constitution that the working class must be denied the vote. The Chartist leaders were jailed; their adherents, numbered in millions, were derided by a legislature representing a bare fraction of the population, and the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities …. Inside and outside England, from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”

Britain did not approach becoming such a democracy until after the First World War. On the eve of that conflagration, only 30 per cent of the adult population (no women and 60 per cent of men) could vote. Britain was thus less democratic than its illiberal adversary, Germany, which had manhood suffrage.

The community of the free in the US was more expansive – voting for all white men was in place by 1856 – but that was because of the existence of millions of black slaves and endless expanses of supposedly “unpossessed” land. Even so, the idea that wage labourers were, in reality, wage slaves – because of their material dependence on employers, their state was comparable to that of chattel slaves – was enormously strong in the 19^th century.

And one of the strongest of the liberal “exclusion clauses” related to women. The vote wasn’t granted to women in the US until 1920. In Britain female votes were only achieved following a campaign of militant civil disobedience and hungry strikes and the massive turmoil of World War One. Women gained the vote partially in 1918 and, unconditionally, in 1928.

Far from being synonymous with democracy, liberalism, as Losurdo points out, regarded it with “coldness, hostility and sometimes frank contempt” – an attitude maintained for more than two centuries. Democracy and equal rights didn’t flow naturally from liberalism; they had to be prised from it:

… it must be borne in mind that the exclusion clauses were not overcome painlessly, but through violent upheavals of sometimes quite unprecedented violence. The abolition of slavery in the wake of the Civil War cost the United States more victims than both world wars combined. As for censitary discrimination [restrictions on the electoral franchise], a decisive contribution was made to its abolition by the French revolutionary cycle. Finally, in major countries like Russia, Germany and the United States the accession of women to political rights had behind it the war and revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century (Liberalism: A Counter-History, p 341).

The new liberalism

But, it will be objected, all this refers not so much to the history of liberalism, as its pre-history. With the emergence of the ‘new liberalism’ in the late 19^th century, the creed of liberalism changed beyond recognition. It became reconciled to – even championed – democracy, economic regulation and racial and gender equality. John Maynard Keynes, for example, an economist synonymous with scepticism towards laissez-faire capitalism, was a lifelong member of the British Liberal party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably the most famous of 20^th century American liberals (he never called himself a socialist), placed freedom of speech and freedom of worship on a par with freedom from want for “everyone in the world”.

The face of modern liberalism can be seen in the public letter of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates published in January who warn that European “liberal democracy” is confronted with “a threat not seen since the 1930s”. The liberal values espoused here are those of internationalism, anti-populism and toleration. Democracy is ostensibly defended, not derided.

But the older liberalism has not died. It is, in fact, arguably more influential than its modernised twin. Neoliberalism (‘new liberalism’) has been guiding force of the economy since the 1980s. Neoliberalism holds that market forces should determine economic decisions, taxes on wealth and corporations should be as low as possible and government budgets should be balanced (a feat always to be achieved by cutting public spending rather than raising taxes on the wealthy). Neoliberalism harks back very directly to economic liberalism, the doctrine of laissez-faire that asserted that contracts negotiated between ‘free’ individuals should not be interfered with by the state.

Except that economic liberalism is a misnomer. The original 20^th century economic liberals, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, did not regard themselves as economic liberals but consistent liberals. To them, the other liberals had abandoned the tenets of liberalism and embraced ‘socialism’. It was always a cause of some regret to Hayek that his ideas were taken up by the British Conservative party – he was a major influence on Margaret Thatcher – rather than the Liberals.

Taking the risk out of democracy

And Hayek and Von Mises retained the older liberalism’s coldness towards democracy. Hayek, for example, was full of praise for Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet and believed that “liberal dictatorship” was infinitely preferable to “democratic government devoid of liberalism”. Von Mises, a generation older, regarded trade unionism as a form of terrorism and thought the merit of Italian Fascism – won through saving European civilisation from the workers’ movement – would “live on eternally in history” (and this in a book entitled Liberalism).

The temptation is to say that we are dealing with two distinct political currents that, by dint of historical coincidence, go by the same name. But that would be too hasty a judgement. Hayek, for instance, was very sympathetic to the idea of European federalism. To him it offered protection against the virus of democracy. “The absence of tariff walls and the free movements of men and capital between the states of the federation has certain important consequences which are frequently overlooked,” he wrote in a 1939 essay. “They limit to a great extent the scope of the economic policy of the individual states.”

Hayek’s praise for the virtues of “one single market” thus prefigures the creation of the EU’s single market which does indeed limit the economic policy of individual European states and enshrines the free movement of capital and people. And the single market – resolutely supported by Margaret Thatcher it should be recalled – is the core institution of a European Union whose “liberal values”, intellectuals warn, are under attack from nativists and xenophobes.  

But the clearest bridge between the two liberalisms can be seen in the outlook of the corporate elite at the Davos World Economic Forum. Their concern about the threats to what they term the “liberal order” has now risen to a crescendo. This order comprises the free movement of capital and commodities (globalisation) coupled with a cosmopolitan attitude and support for gender and racial diversity.

However their stance towards the arch destroyer of that liberal order – Donald Trump – is revealing. They are repelled by his protectionism, hostility to immigrants, sexism and xenophobia but irresistibly attracted to his indulgence of the immensely wealthy. When, in 2017, Trump massively cut taxes for the rich (reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 per cent and instituting tax breaks for millionaires), Davos went weak at the knees at this long overdue “tax reform”.

Contrast this with the unrelenting hostility directed towards left-wingers such as Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who are in fact resiliently liberal in their opposition to attacks on immigrants, refugees or LGBT people but also in favour raising taxes, moderately, on the wealthy (and, in Corbyn’s case, renationalising public services). Should Corbyn become UK Prime Minister – which now seems likely – expect that hostility to ramp up into brazen attempts to bring down his government, by any means possible. And liberals will be at the forefront of that effort. The tragedy is, they will always return to their roots.

The Carbon Lie, part two

The crucial role of international trade in global warming

I’m going to do some speculating. The reason the rate of embodied, trade-based carbon emissions discussed in part one is so significant is that overall CO₂ emissions are intimately connected – not to the degree of economic growth per se – but to the amount of international trade.

Foreign direct investment – and thus global trade – mushroomed from the 1990s onwards as globalisation took root. Manufacturing companies upped and left the deindustrializing West and relocated to countries like China*.The products they made had to be transported back to consumers in rich countries via container ships and aeroplanes and therefore emissions shot up. Between 2000 and 2008 the emissions’ growth rate reached 3.4%.

Everything came to a juddering halt in 2008 with the global financial crisis. But the respite was short-lived – in 2010 emissions’ growth returned with a vengeance, hitting 5.9%.

Then something strange happened. Global economic growth continued, albeit at a historically subdued level, but carbon emissions did not follow suit. They were, in fact, flat for three straight years (2014-2016). For the first time ever emissions were not rising in tandem with GDP growth. This prompted notions that the world had reached peak emissions and that CO₂ pollution was finally “decoupling from economic activity”.

However, such hopes were dashed almost as soon as they were raised. In 2017, carbon emissions started growing again, reaching a historic high.

These developments become a lot less puzzling when global trade, as opposed bare economic growth levels, is brought into the picture. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Status of World Trade 2017 report, world trade grew at less than 2 per cent a year from 2011-14, declined by 10 per cent in 2015 – during which time the profitability of global shipping companies sank like a stone – and dropped by a further 3 per cent in 2016. However, reports UNCTAD, the “dismal performance” of world trade over the previous eight years came to an end during 2017.  

After an unpromising beginning at the start of the year, “Trade growth”, notes the report, “picked up substantially in the second and third quarters of 2017”. In the fourth quarter, trade was expected to achieve growth rates 10% higher than those of 2016. Trade was anticipated to outperform GDP growth in 2017 (4 percent points compared with 3.6), something it had done consistently since the middle of the 19^th century, except for the period 2011-2016, when coincidentally carbon emissions remained flat or fell. Importantly, noted UNCTAD, trade growth was widespread across both developed and emerging economies.

Hence, the years in which global CO₂ emissions did not rise were concurrent with declining world trade, and the return to rising emissions synchronous with the revival of world trade. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

It is true that global economic growth has increased as well, but to nothing like the same degree. According to the International Monetary Fund it was 3.1% in 2015, 3.2% in 2016, 3.6% in 2017 and projected to reach 3.7% in 2018: an incremental rise but nothing spectacular. If trade growth – as anticipated – has continued into 2018, it is a sure fire bet that carbon emissions will have increased as well.

Why does international trade cause emissions? Through a combination of the pollution caused in the manufacture of goods or extraction of raw materials and in transporting them often thousands of miles to end user markets.

The Establishment in denial

But this connection between global trade and global warming is anathema to both liberal and conservative commentators. Donald Trump, for example, is roundly lambasted for stoking a trade war with China by introducing tariffs on commodities like steel. Such restraints on trade and protectionism are seen as dangerous and potentially leading, as they have done in the past, to actual physical conflict. These worries are warranted – protectionism and tariff imposition preceded the massive conflagrations of the First and Second World Wars, although it should also be pointed out that most countries, including the US in the 19^th century, industrialised precisely because they protected their domestic enterprises.

However, we also know that the way the world economy is currently configured – a configuration in which unfettered trade between nations is considered sacrosanct – will cause drought, mass poverty, the inundation of coastal areas, a refugee crisis to dwarf anything we have so far experienced and, very likely, physical conflict in just over 20 years.

The fixation on international trade as beneficial and leading to peace, not war, among nations is immensely hard to dislodge. It is, as this article points out, the most venerable of the “numerous ideological shibboleths” of the liberal-capitalist order, which can be traced back to the notion of the 19^th century economist David Ricardo that free trade allows countries to exploit their ‘comparative advantage’. Unimpeded trade between nations, said Ricardo, would maximise benefit to consumers and allow for the most efficient use of domestic natural resources.

In time, the notion that countries that trade with each other were unlikely to go to war was added to the carapace justifying unfettered trade. Not only does international trade benefit the consumer but is also forges links of mutual self-interest between nations. Hence, UNCTAD’s synonym for world trade – “economic interdependence”.

In our era, the significance of trade has grown beyond its relevance to the consumer. A lot of trade is now intra-industry. International supply chains allow corporations to shift production or assembling to where it is cheapest (a process known as ‘global labour arbitrage’), while more intricate, technical processes take place in developed countries. The most famous examples are Apple’s iPhone, iPads and iPods. Their components are manufactured in multiple countries – including the US, China, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands – but assembled in just one, China. The threads of international trade involved in constructing Apple’s products, and then transporting them to the consumer, are immense.

The transformation that isn’t

But still – in spite of the acknowledged gravity of the situation – proposed solutions to climate change eschew structural change in favour of financial incentives and technological transformation, demonstrating, if nothing else, the stubbornness of the liberal-capitalist faith in international trade.

The IPCC paints a picture of the calamities that will ensue if CO₂ emissions are not drastically reduced by 2040 but places its hopes in widespread carbon pricing – charging producers for the amount of CO₂ they emit. This is despite the fact that carbon pricing has been introduced by many countries but global emissions have continued to rise.

We need an economic transformation, says the IPCC, for which there is “no documented historical precedent”. But in terms of how to achieve this radical change the well documented precedent of neoliberalism reigns supreme.

The International Maritime Organisation has agreed a non-binding commitment to reduce shipping emissions by 50% by 2050. But the way to achieve this is purely technological. Projections that global trade is to increase dramatically over the coming decades are accepted without question. Rather it is proposed that the currently 50,000-strong global shipping fleet rapidly adopt zero-carbon technology, such as batteries, renewable fuels derived from hydrogen and bioenergy.

Such a transformation is regarded as quite possible with “the correct level of investment”.  Studiously ignored is the fact that investment – the financing of new equipment or machinery – has steadily fallen in advanced capitalist countries, including in export giants like Germany, over the past four decades (see Chart 5.2, p 143). Contemporary, financialised capitalism specialises in extracting profit but not in long-term technological transformation.

Introducing tariffs and stoking trade wars is not the way to achieve the necessary slashing of carbon emissions. Even if it did succeed in reducing emissions – which is far from certain – the consequences are perilous. Notwithstanding the rampant racism involved, rising international tensions might well lead to war.

The rational reduction of global trade

Nonetheless, if climate change is to be mitigated significantly, which must be the aim of any rational political movement, the shibboleth of uninhibited world trade must be tackled. As Naomi Klein says in This Changes Everything, long-haul, energy intensive transport has to be rationed – “reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive”.

So it falls on the Left to steer a delicate course – reducing world trade in such a way that does not provoke xenophobia and international conflict, economic or physical. This, to be frank, is not an easy task. Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Build it in Britain’ campaign and assertion that a future Labour government would try to ensure that “we build things here that for too long have been built abroad” was a step in the right direction. But, inevitably, insourcing – the reversal of outsourcing to the other side of the world – is going to have to happen on a large scale.

But there are clear non-capitalist consequences that should be embraced. The ultimate source of profit can be endlessly debated but, in essence, profit is a mark-up over costs. Hence, enormous profits are made from the trading of oil and gas (oil has to be extracted, transported and refined; all occasions for the insertion of profit). However, renewable energy embodies a completely different logic. It does not have to be transported and is freely available. Beyond the high costs of infrastructure development, the price of transmitting the resultant energy to consumers and enterprises, is minimal. There is no reason at all why the production and transmission of renewable energy should be privately owned or a source of profit.

Likewise, the technological future of production, for example 3D Printing, is not for goods to be transported thousands of miles to end markets but to be produced locally. If global trade is to be radically curtailed in the coming years – as it has to be – such a development will likely go with the grain of economic development, not be in conflict with it.

*This process, by the way, wasn’t exclusive to Anglo-European countries. South Korea, a major industrialised country by the 1980s, also shifted production to China and, as a result, trade between the two increased by 1431% between 1995 and 2015.

The Carbon Lie, part one

Officially, the United Kingdom has been stunningly successful in reducing its carbon footprint. Despite green-lighting fracking and the expansion of Heathrow, Britain’s CO₂ emissions have fallen by 38% since 1990 and are now as low as they were when Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890.

However, this is a lie. Not in the sense the UK government is fiddling the figures, though many claim that emissions from major infrastructure projects are deliberately miscounted, but because the UK has only achieved this reduction in emissions because it has outsourced them to other countries.

Britain has gone through rampant and conscious deindustrialisation over the last three decades. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, manufacturing made up 30% of the economy and employed 6.8 million people. By 2010, at the end of the last Labour government, it had shrunk to 11 per cent of GNP and had a workforce of just 2.5 million.

However, people have not learned to live on fresh air. Many of the products that were once made in Britain are now imported. This increases CO₂ emissions in two ways – one because the manufactured products and commodities may be made or extracted under worse environmental conditions than might have been the case domestically (though still often under the aegis of western-based multinationals) and two because they have to be transported thousands of miles across oceans, usually by container ship, to their end markets.

Embodied emissions between China and the UK, for example, increased by 333% between 1995 and 2015. The kind of products traded in this manner includes both industrial goods – steel and cement for example – but also consumer items such as toys, trainers, clothes and office equipment.

Thus, while the UK’s territorial carbon emissions have been slashed, primarily because of domestic deindustrialisation, the overall carbon footprint that the UK is responsible for, which includes so-called embodied or traded emissions, has not. According to a report on the ‘Carbon Loophole’ from August 2018:

The UK’s territorial CO₂ emissions have been declining for decades, and it has been one of the few countries able to report a decline in absolute emissions. However, considering the embodied carbon in imports, this apparent success is partly reversed. The total carbon footprint, inclusive of embodied CO₂ in imports, has slightly increased since 1990.

Clearly, the UK is not alone, though its rate of deindustrialisation, and thus reliance on trade, is extreme. In the US, for example, embodied carbon imports grew rapidly from the 1990s onwards but declined following the 2008 financial crisis and have plateaued since then. The EU and Japan paint a similar picture. Thus, while the advanced capitalist countries officially claim they are mitigating climate change, they are in fact doing the opposite. As the report says:

Remarkably, in all cases, changes in emissions embodied in imports are comparable to or larger than changes in domestic emissions. Thus, under a consumer responsibility principle, developed countries have not recorded a decrease from 1990 levels, but rather an increase.

This deception arises from the fact that when countries report their greenhouse gas emissions they do so on the basis of their territorial emissions only. The emissions generated in the production of goods for trade go towards the territorial emissions of the country they are produced in (say China or India). And the emissions generated by transporting the products to developed country markets are not counted at all. This is an unfortunate oversight considering that emissions from shipping are predicted to double or even triple by 2050 (see executive summary).

The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that caused a sweeping gnashing of teeth for almost 48 hours stated that unless greenhouse gas pollution was reduced by 45% by 2040 and by 100% by 2050, coastlines would be inundated by rising seas and droughts and food shortages would become rampant. The IPCC said there was “no documented historical precedent” for the economic transformation that is required. Tragically, such an economic metamorphosis is even more difficult if the nature of the problem is misunderstood in the first place – if we are labouring under the misconceptions of, in Naomi Klein’s words, “a vastly distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions”.

What lies at the root of these misconceptions is an obdurate belief in the beneficence of global trade. International trade, in the dominant liberal-capitalist mind-set, is seen as both the wellspring of wealth and prosperity and a guardian against the dark forces that will be unleashed if it is impaired.

Unfortunately, the Left, too, seems woefully under-prepared for the scale of the transformation that is called for.

Which will be the subject of Part Two of this post.